RMH
Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
★
Show & Tell
shark vs the universe
Noah Kahan
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
untitled
@theartofmadeline
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
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sheepfilms
roma★
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occasionally subtle
Keni
𓃗
Andulka
h
Mike Driver
seen from Dominican Republic
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@kate-ink-blog
Computer is my co-writer? Computers are getting better at writing. Stephen Marche explains that there is a new program that goes way, way beyond your phone's auto-predict, and can even write The Metamorphosis.
This article at first terrified me, because I thought of how Instagram filters and Photoshop have in some cases replaced wet darkroom photography, but I know that humans can best express and create art.
In response to the undercounting of non-White and non-English speaking people by the U.S. census, artist Ekene Ijeoma and his group Poetic J
A Counting is an incredible sound portrait of the United States.
In The New York Times, artist and creator of A Counting, Ekene Ijeoma, reports that the idea came from thinking about the U.S. census. “The census has historically misrepresented the linguistic and ethnic diversity of the U.S.,” Ijeoma said. “As people of color, we haven’t been counted as a whole, and when we have been counted, it’s been used against us. I started thinking about what it would mean to count to a whole in a way that uses everyone’s voice.”
Crafty Book Banning at Michaels
Apparently, a new book on cross-stitch, titled “Feminist Cross-Stitch,” was too much for two Michaels employees. They noticed the book contained the "F" word in at least four of its 40 patterns, and they were unnerved.
They sounded the alarm. HQ took action. Not quite a book burning, but something close: "Feminist Cross-Stitch" was pulled from the shelves and Michaels ordered all its retailers to toss it in the trash.
Language, Please! Salty Feminist Stitch Book Is Too Much for Michaels.
France has long defended the purity of its language with an official list of permitted words, but the launch of a new online dictionary with
New French dictionary aims to embrace diversity of world’s Francophones.
Well it's about time.
“I am an invisible man...I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.”
-Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
A Personal Matter
Lately, I've become jaded and a little sick of the gushing hyperbolic blurbs on the covers of my paperbacks. However, when I read that The New York Times called Kenzaburo Oe's novel A Personal Matter "very close to a perfect contemporary novel," I had to agree.
The book is about Bird, a Peter-Pan man who seems allergic to growing up. When the novel opens, Bird is buying maps of Africa for a fantasy trip while his wife is in the hospital, in labor with their first child. When the child is born with a brain hernia, Bird again flees from adult responsibility and seeks to numb reality with a whiskey and sex binge with a former girlfriend.
The honesty in this book struck me as nothing less than incredible. The descriptions of Bird's shame feel poignant and real, yet I can't remember ever reading descriptions of deep self-loathing and shame rendered in such a completely perfect way.
The book jacket as well as the reviews all tell me that Oe's own son was born disabled a year before A Personal Matter was published. Did that make me believe the book more? Or does a writer usually need to go through a profoundly painful event in order to write about it?
The book deals with shame as well as sexuality with a directness that feels formidable. There is so much power in honesty that I feel unable to read other books because the author is so clearly making the emotions up.
And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.
Sylvia Plath
It is never too late to be what you might have been.
George Eliot
That Insane “Speak English” Guy
This man forgot something: “Taking it from the top, for centuries countless indigenous languages were spoken in North America, from the Eskimo-Aleut languages of Alaska and the Northwest Territories through the endless dialects of various Native American linguistic groups, including branches related to the Aztecs, Apaches, Iroquois, Algonquian, and Sioux nations. And this is just the tip of our vast linguistic iceberg.”
And besides the fact that the southwest was officially Mexican until the mid-19th century, the United States has no official language.
Portlandia, Did You Read It?
The great doesn’t happen through impulse alone, and is a succession of little things that are brought together.
Van Gogh, in a letter to his brother
Power of Four-Letter Words
A new study finds that swearing increases one’s tolerance to pain and makes one less inhibited.
But the also found that people who swear regularly throughout the course of the day are more immune to the “bad” words’ benefits. Before worrying that we would run out of profanity, however, rest assured that we will always think up new and more shocking taboo words.
Is it Octopuses? Octopi? YES! And then some. Kory Stamper, an Associate Editor at Merriam-Webster, talks about the plural version of octopus.
(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFyY2mK8pxk)
The Icelandic language, seen by many as a source of identity and pride, is being undermined by the widespread use of English.
The Backward Index: 315,000 words spelled in reverse
A paid employee at Merriam-Webster typed all the dictionary entries...backward. See the video here.
Seeking Word Authority: Wikipedia Loses to Dictionaries
“Move Over, Wikipedia. Dictionaries Are Hot Again.”
Words still have significance. With all the debate in these politically raucous times about the meaning of words, more people have turned to dictionaries to prove that common language is not entirely meaningless.
The New York Times writes: “...after years of the English language being degraded by text messages and hashtags, dictionaries have made a surprising comeback in the United States.”
